Look at the hours of free cooking instruction on TV, and more given gratis in stores and even in restaurants. It makes one wonder why anyone would pay good money and block out a chunk of time to watch pretty much the same thing.
Yet every year there are new cooking classes and new teachers and new students. Not always more. But there is always some interest, if only because relatively few mothers of late had any great cooking skills to pass on to the next generation.
Indeed, if anything, all those food shows have served to increase the interest in food and cooking.
As Emeril Lagasse - and other experts - predict, food service soon may be America's biggest industry.
Who could doubt it?
Who would have thought a decade or so back that a "star" chef would even be recognized on the street, let alone inspire the kind of mass hysteria once reserved for rock stars?
And it is not just Emeril.
In food these days, anything seems possible. How else to explain a gangly senior chef with solid gold culinary credentials moving to Las Vegas and, soon after, baring almost all in national print ads - for the love of his food processor?
It boggles the mind to think that other chefs might follow Jean-Louis Palladin's lead.
Local celebrity chef Christina Pirello made others more aware of the importance of whole foods. And this year, what started as a few classes on healthful cooking became a major part of the curriculum. The current cooking-school list not only has a good number of programs focused on health, but nearly every school has some healthy food instruction - if not vegetarian or macrobiotic, then low-fat or low-cholesterol or low-calorie.
On a smaller scale, there is a noticeable surge in sushi classes and presentations of the foods of Italy, particularly Tuscan buffets.
And the inevitable Y2K party plans.
"People are eating out more than ever and are interested in more ethnic foods . . . [East] Indian, Spanish and such, but they're not cooking them at home because it's too difficult," said Charlotte Ann Albertson, a long-time teacher and cooking school director.
"People will come to a class to see how those foods are made and to taste them," Albertson added, "because they want to understand it, to know what they are ordering."
Among the more unusual offerings are seminars on developing a restaurant, marketing a food product, and writing about food. The lines between amateurs and professionals sometimes blur.
